Million Dollar Exits Ep.9 with Andrew Gazdecki: How To Grow Your Startup For Future Acquisition

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Million Dollar Exits Podcast. I'm here with a very special guest, Andrew Gazdecki. Andrew, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, KP. Good to be back on here. I guess this is our second podcast.

I know, I know. Well, so you came on last time when we riffed on building in public. And at the time, you know, we were talking about the book that came out. And, you know, I think MicroAcquire was in a Very different chapter at the time, you know. So can you bring us to today? Where are you guys up to? I've seen some amazing stats and traction that you keep posting on Twitter. What is it like today? We're speaking as of May 9th, 2023. Some top-of-mind journey updates.

Yeah, I mean, it's been a wild ride, that's for sure. And it's never a dull day. Yeah. At Acquire, that's for sure.

Oh yeah, it's Acquire now. I'm sorry for still calling it MicroAcquire.

Yeah, I still got MicroAcquire in the background. I'm going to keep that because never, never forget where we came from. Uh, but yeah, I mean, since the last time we spoke, I mean, hundreds of acquisitions, um, a lot of advancements just in our tooling and our efforts to make acquisitions easier. Like our LOI builder, asset purchase agreement builder, uh, P&L builder. We're still building out that product suite so you can essentially sell your business, um, using all of our software and our tooling.

That's good. That's good. And, uh, I mean, the shipping velocity I think it acquires is awesome. It's something to admire.

I, I, I gotta, I gotta stop you there though. So I'm, I'm not technical. So I gotta give a shout out to, um, Steven Heiser. He's my VP of product and my whole product team. So I have no technical chops whatsoever. Well, that makes two of us. They get full credit.

But, you know, I got a chance to talk to some of them and, you know, such a great team and such a, you know, I think humble and hungry, you know, I think it's the right sort of framing. And so, yeah, I mean, shout out to everyone who's been working nonstop and putting, you know, update after update on Twitter. So in terms of the million-dollar exits and sort of the premise of this episode, A couple of questions come to mind for you naturally, Andrew. You've walked the path, you walked, you went from idea to exit. You've written a book about that. I think, I guess if I have to say, you know, for folks who are maybe dialing in for the first time and maybe want to hear that exit story of yours succinctly, how would you summarize what happened? There's stair-stepping stuff we want to talk about, I want to talk about, but like, when did you see the power of that exit?

I'll give a brief background and then we can see where it takes us. So Been an entrepreneur my whole life. You know that, KP. Was, you know, selling stuff on eBay, all the cliché stuff little entrepreneurs do. And I went into college knowing I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I know, like, getting a job scared the shit out of me.

Yeah, totally.

Scared the shit out of me. And so from day one, I was like, okay, I have 4 years. I went to CSU Chico State. Kind of a party school, great entrepreneurship school or program. Absolutely fantastic. Well,

underrated.

I think you have to give a few shoutouts.

Underrated, yeah.

Yeah, like Peter Strauss, Christian Friedland. I would go to them every summer with a new idea. And so they would help me think through how are you going to find your first customers? How are you going to build this out? And then me not being technical, they'd also kind of help You know, my first startup was a job board. So just to kind of answer your question and accelerate this answer, went into college knowing I wanted to build a business and that was my goal. And I started with a job board and I just bought like a script. It was like an Upwork clone and I just put it on a server. But what I was doing was I knew mobile was gonna be big.

Mm-hmm.

And I wanted to just get myself in that space. I think there's a lot of, probably adjacent spaces now that you can think the same way, like AI maybe being one, right? Just get in the game, if you will. Like if you think that's going to have a huge future, which I think a lot of people agree on. And then started noticing people posting jobs for the same sort of app development. So as an example, people would go on the job board, they would say, I want a mobile app for my high-end luxury hotel and I'm willing to pay $50,000. I saw that and I was like— Interesting. So there's these do-it-yourself website builders and do-it-yourself, you know, other type business models. What if there is a do-it-yourself mobile app builder specifically for small businesses?

Right.

So I sold the job board, used the money as essentially, you know, seed funding to— and then I also found the developer on the job board because I knew them all. So that was a nice Nice connection. And then, yeah, so I built this company called Business Apps and it was essentially a no-code mobile app builder and ran that company for 8 years from 21 to 29 when we were finally acquired. We developed, to my knowledge, more mobile apps than any other company in the world. And the way that we would figure that out is Apple would publish how many apps they approve because they have a really stringent approval process. And then we just do simple division. So at one point at our peak, we were powering about 5% of all mobile apps created. And then we grew the company to, you know, around $10 million in annual recurring revenue when I was 29.

Wow. That's, that's amazing. And that brings you to, you know, the birth of MicroAcquire. And I feel like, uh, that—

You got, you got to call it Acquire, man.

Oh my God, man. I'm just so, I think I need it. I need it.

It's hard for me. It's hard for me too.

I just love—

Any type of rebrand.

I feel like, I feel like that you built up such a great goodwill around MicroAcquire, the brand. And so it's like, it's an evolution. Acquire is still great, that OG love. It's like when you know a band and you heard the first album, you're like, that's the OG stuff, right? So fast forward to Acquire, key insight there, which, you know, I think the readers will appreciate, listeners will appreciate, was you actually personally went through the exit process. Which, you know, was not— it was bumpy and rocky, I'm assuming, and you learned a ton about what could be improved. Is that correct? And is that the genesis for the next thing that you did?

Yeah. Well, I think if you go and solve any big problem, just being able to say that you've personally experienced the problem gives you so many unique insights into the nuances, and especially when it comes to acquisitions. Like, like, I'll give you some specific examples of kind of how I applied going through an acquisition to Acquire, MicroAcquire, Acquire.com, whatever, whatever we're calling it these days. So a few, a few moments were interesting. So when you list on Acquire.com, everything is private. Mm-hmm. So you have to grant buyers access to your private information or other known as your data room. And that's because I remember the day I told my team when we were selling the business. And I waited until we had a circle closing date because my biggest fear was telling the team that we're going to sell the business and then we end up not selling it. And then they're just kind of in limbo wondering like, hey, should I quit? Like, what's going on here? So I wanted to make sure it was a, you know, it was high probability it was going to go through. But when I did a short all hands with my team and said, hey, I'll be in the back if you have any questions, I'm happy to address them one by one. And the range of questions were, am I becoming a billionaire, millionaire? When am I getting fired? Like everything in between. So there's a lot of just emotion and it's not something that you obviously want to publicly display to your team sometimes or Definitely not your customers. So there's privacy built into Acquire. And then also just due diligencing on the buyer as well. That's another big one. So we'll verify how many funds they have. They have to connect their LinkedIn profile. They have to verify their ID. So that was another big fear of mine is, and I due diligence the buyer of Business Aperture, which was ESW Capital PE firm. Just calling people that are prior CEOs of businesses that they had bought because I didn't want to sign an LOI, go through due diligence and have it fall through. And LOIs can fall through for material reasons like financials are incorrect or something like that. But sometimes they fall through because the buyer is not experienced or just some— they get cold feet. There's a number of different reasons. Yeah. But I wanted to know how many of those LOIs close once you sign them. So, you know, build verification or, you know, ability to due diligence a buyer into Acquire. So when you list— when I first launched MicroAcquire, the only place to list your business was, you know, some other marketplaces and then business brokers. And if you listed it on another marketplace, it was not private. Mm-hmm. The people reaching out to you to buy your business was, KP499921. I have no idea who you are.

It was fully on you. I'm not going

to figure out who KP499921 is. And so there's some nuances like that I built into the product as well as, you know, verifiable financials, just being able to connect, you know, your Stripe account or whatever billing system you're using, Google traffic, just to make you presenting your data easier to buyers as well. So just like nuanced points like that, I think Really helped.

Dude, I gotta ask you 2 profound questions that just came to me as you were explaining this, and I meant to ask you—

Oh, profound.

Yeah, profound. In my DMs, but I was like, okay, you know what, maybe this is the avenue. One thing that blew my mind witnessing sort of the journey from the sidelines, sort of following you, I think both of us follow each other's work, and when you came out and when sort of MicroAcquire, the original MicroAcquire came out and making waves in Twitter land and whatever, all these, and the internet land, there were some very established marketplaces, you know, uh, I— we can name a couple of them, Flippa, and so on and so forth. The, the thing that was stunning to me was that you came into the market with a wedge to the market, which is a very small sliver of the feature set that they all boasted about, you know. And you've been playing the patient game since then, which is 3, 4 years ago since I first found out, maybe 2 years, I don't know. To slowly expand that feature set, but not rushing at any point. It doesn't feel like you're trying to copy what their feature set is or anybody's feature set is. Dude, where do you get the patience from? Like, it's so crazy because think about it, I think a lot of founders default to, oh my God, like, we have to have 1,500 features because the incumbent has that. And I think there's a level of patience that you seem to exhibit. Which is ironic because I just complimented the team and you 5 minutes ago saying you're so fast, you know, fast but patient. How?

I guess, you know, what I ultimately want to do with acquire.com, MicroAcquire, Acquire, is truly change and standardize how startups are acquired. Like, we want to have the standard NDA, we want to have the standard asset purchase agreement. We want to have the standard tooling that buyers use to diligence startups that they're looking to acquire. And that takes time. That takes a lot of time, especially, you know, when we start to talk about acquisitions in the millions. And this is kind of counterintuitive, but I don't look at our competition at all. Maybe I'll look at their website once in a while, but I don't have an account, you know, at another marketplace. I'm not signed up for broker newsletters. And, you know, that could— I don't recommend that for all entrepreneurs, but for me, I like, again, with our goal of trying to completely transform like how this process happens and making things more efficient, faster. And again, once you reach standardization, it makes it so much easier for both the buyer and the seller. And if we're just looking at a brokerage shop, well, we're just, we're not really disrupting anything. We're just hiring a bunch of brokers and we're not really a product company. We're more of a sales company. And then if we're looking at, you know, some of the more established market players when I first launched Acquire, we're really just building a marginally better marketplace. And I think to build something 10 times better, you have to think completely different. So our goal isn't to be better. It's to be entirely different. Right. And I think if you focus too much, it's good to be aware about your competition, but obsessing over them or they did this, so we got to do that. I don't like that frame of thinking because we want to be so different that when you compare side by side, it's not apples to apples. It's really, you can tell the difference in the user experience and the feature set. Who is our customer? We view the founder as the most important person in the products that we build and why we build them. And if you notice, all of our content, all of our marketing is for startup founders rather than the buyer when everyone's kind of looking at, you know, attracting buyers. Right. But in reality, when you get— when you have, you know, the best startup listings, buyers naturally come to you. And then also that's your customer is your is the person selling the business, in my view. Or at least that was the gap I saw in the market, was a lot of places favoring the buyer over startup founders. So I think just kind of having that frame of mind of what are you trying to do? Are you trying to build something just marginally better or completely different? Because if you're trying to build something completely different, sometimes it helps to just think about your personal experiences and build what you wish, like change, I guess, you know, as Maybe this could be a quote, but like change your world and then ideally that'll change other people's world. So solve the problems that you went through and then ideally that will help people solve the problems that they're going through. They're going through the same thing that you went through and you solve it in a way that you wish that you had when you were in that moment. I think that's how you make the best products and the best startups.

Like I said, profound, right? I knew the. I knew you were going to drop some gems. But here, here's another follow-up in a different direction. I'm going to take this. Another thing that you know stood out to me, and I know a lot of people who listen to this or who have been following you will agree, is dude, you're putting out a clinic every day and every month, every week on Twitter about customer service. I don't know anyone else that I know who has more than 150-200K followers who replies as much. As you do to, you know, comments, thoughtful tweets, celebrating their MicroAcquire acquisition or whatever. You're just there, you know, and it's not that you're doing it today, you know, when you sort of have the spotlight. I feel like I've seen you do it for the last 3, 4, 5 years since I've known you and I followed you. That's just clinic in customer service. That's just clinic in keeping happy customers happier, making them happier. What's your take on this? Is this intentional? Is this unintentional? It's just how you see business. Because I think, let me tell you, this is not the standard. This is not the standard. And we both know that.

Yeah, I don't know. I don't really have like a master plan or strategy around that. I just like helping people. That's kind of what motivates me from my tweets to, you know, whether it's like customer support. Question, you got it. Sure, I can answer it. Or just the tweets I write, you know, regularly. I like helping people. It's kind of what, what drives me, as cheesy as that sounds. But, you know, it is kind of— it can get tough. So I apologize if I miss anyone's.

Yeah, let me tell you, he's never missed one tweet of mine. Uh, and I know this is not now, but like always, anything that there was a question or DM or Uh, a particular, you know, whatever, uh, he's always there. You know, that's just wild, man. I admire that. And I try to live up to the same thing, but—

Let me tell you a story. Um, well, I think it really just comes down to, like, when I first started MicroAcquire, I was doing everything. I was managing the product team. I was doing customer support. I was doing, you know, all the marketing. I was taking all the listings live. I was writing the newsletter. And that amount of work just isn't possible unless you truly, truly, truly love what you do. And so when I answer those questions, I'm just answering them in a way of, I'm not answering them as, hey, this is my job. I should answer. It's more just, oh, you need some help and you're using my product. That's awesome. I'm happy to help you. And, you know, I always have respected leaders that lead from the front as well. And the story that I love to share is one of my favorite baseball players is Derek Jeter. And the reason being is my parents would take me to see the Yankees play. I grew up in Southern California, but him and Mariano Rivera would sign from center field all the way to home plate. And what that meant, and I got his autograph like 3 times. Wow. I just thought it was so cool. He's like a superstar. He's got his whole team and he's at an away game and he's signing autographs for all these like people. And the point I'm trying to make is just, you know, we do have a support team. We do have other people I can delegate this to, but it also helps me, you know, again, like I got Micro Choir in the background. I'm keeping it up, never forgetting where you came from. Like these people are the ones that make the business successful. And I think when you lose touch with the customer, you know, bad things can happen. So it's also a way of me just being in touch of, oh, great feedback, or, oh, I can help you right away, or whatever it may be. Really being in touch with the community,

keeping, uh,

I think keeping up can go a long way.

Giving a pulse on, you know, what people are talking about. Like this other, I think a couple of days ago we saw Brian Chesky, you know, who yet another example of, I think, uh, he shared like, hey, What are some improvements you have for Airbnb? And Airbnb is a public company; it's got sixty billion dollars or something market cap. And he was actually replying to some of the tweets that people were making about improvements. And Elon Musk tweeted that, saying, "I wish more founders and CEOs literally did this." You know, some version of this, right? Doesn't have to be like exactly that. But I truly think that keeping your ear close to the ground is highly, highly underrated. And I've worked at companies. Some mega companies and startups as well, where the CEOs don't do that. And you can easily tell when they're in the boardroom and they're like, "You have no clue, man. You haven't talked to a customer. Haven't sold anything in the last five days." We can tell strategy-wise this is completely you know not based in reality.

I I would. I did see that tweet and I thought it was awesome. Yeah. It's like these are these are the people that pay your bills, man. Like right? You know respect. And it's true. Customers are the most sustainable source of funding.

True again.

You know, they—

That is a great segue for us to talk about bootstrapping. You, Arvid Kahl, Rob Walling, and a few others, you know, like you, you guys have changed my life because I was in the VC camp, which I think, again, I'm not saying it's a, you know, there's place for everything, right? But I was heavily, you know, charting ahead in that VC path until 2022. And I made a massive pivot to now being a solo founder in December 2022. Went full time, took the leap. It was scary as shit because I have a young son and we have to pay the bills and all these things. And I'm like, but the best decision that I could have taken, man. The last six months, I've been so blessed, so grateful, enjoying the bootstrap path. And everybody that I'm talking to about the stair-stepping thing that we once touched on, and you know, this is. of formulas we talk about all the time. Everyone's nodding, saying that is the way. And I think I knew this in theory when we last talked, but living it is a whole different thing, you know. So once again, let's go back and double-click on that bootstrapping as a way to stair-stepping to the big swings you want to take at, you know. I know you have a, you have a couple lines on that you've been sharing for a while.

Yeah, definitely. My recommended path for entrepreneurship, I've tweeted this and reworded it like 4 times because I like sharing it. But yeah, like your first business isn't going to be a home run. I'll just tell you right then and there. Sorry, it's not going to be. It doesn't work like that. You know, I think the people who know most about winning know that because they know the most about losing. Yeah. So I recommend your first business, build, build an agency around your skill sets. And if I was starting all over again today, I'd probably start a content business. I'd probably start a podcast, get people on, learn from them, write a newsletter about it.

Kind of what I'm doing. Maybe start part-time. That's the same thing I'm doing right now.

Yeah. And then help other companies do that, edit the videos really well. And I'm not, I'm not technical, but I can edit a video and I can write a newsletter, you know, very low-lift stuff. And now my agency is I help you with your content and branding strategy, just like that. Boom. And then, you know, from that, depending on the business, you have 2 routes that you can take as you stair-step through your career. One idea that typically kind of just comes up for better or for worse is you start automating certain things. Like you build an easier way to edit the videos. You build, you know, a packaged up sort of process of how to do a rebrand or you build a SaaS tool to help your clients with, I'm trying to think of a SaaS tool for content creation, but let's say you think of one. Right. And then that becomes your SaaS business. Then you start funding the development of it. With the profits from your agency. And then I highly recommend bootstrapping that business with the goal of selling it.

Yeah.

Like, no shame. Yeah. Just build a sellable asset. You own the majority of it. Because what a lot of people don't realize is if you can bootstrap a SaaS company to even, let's call it $100,000 in revenue or $500,000 in revenue or $1 million in revenue, that is life— that's a life-changing acquisition. For some people, no, but those are people who are already very rich, you know. So, and then you get that first win, and then from there, your options of what you can do next expand immensely. And I think a lot of founders get stuck in, this is my life work, and, you know, my My purpose and stuff like that.

Mission. Yeah.

And yeah, and that's great. But, you know, I would say, you know, get that first win because you'll be more experienced. You'll really understand whether you just want to lay on the beach for the rest of your life, do something more calm again, like do an agency podcast. You know, that's why you see a lot of, you know, venture-backed founders when they don't succeed. You know, they, they go and bootstrap. Yeah. You know, so maybe, you know, like when I was bootstrapping business apps, the pressure was still pretty high. My work schedule. I know a lot of people talk about bootstrapping for freedom and stuff like that. I was still working like just as much, but that's just me. But yeah, get that first win. And then if you want to build the next Airbnb, if you want to build the next Uber, if you want to build the next what, you're going to need capital to do that. And then that's a time to do it because for 2 reasons. Number one, again, you're more experienced. You've been through the process of building and exiting a startup, the whole story, movie, whatever you want to call it. But then also what a lot of people don't understand is you can afford to take the bigger risk. You can afford to go 10 years potentially without making Any money,

right?

Because you have a win in the middle that helps support, uh, the big moonshot lottery ticket, whatever you want to call it, market disrupting, you know, company. Uh, you can, you can afford to take those risks. Yeah. Um, because a lot of people, I think, get so caught up in like the headlines and like raising venture capital is what makes you successful, but It's actually the exact opposite. The more venture capital you raise, the lower your chances of success become because expectations in terms of enterprise value increase. So for example, you raise $5 million, you know, you got to build a $50 million company minimum. Let's call it $25 million. That's still a lot, you know. So, you know, to do that on the first swing is very difficult. It's kind of like trying to climb Mount Everest with Without any experience, you know, you never climbed a wall, but you

know, you're trying to get to base camp, right? It's crazy.

Yeah, you know, climb, go on a couple hikes first and then maybe try climbing.

It's such a great, it's such a great metaphor. And I, I used another one that I use is, uh, sort of build, build a campsite, like basically build a tent and like have fun, like, and understand the business of camping before you try to build a skyscraper because That's what venture-backed businesses are. And they're— the duration of the game is 10+ years at least. And outcomes expected are IPO. An ideal outcome is an IPO, which is a billion-dollar-plus outcome. And I think a lot of people don't think about those two. And they think about, if only I just raised $150K or $200K and $400K. I'm like, yeah, but you're signing up for the game that takes you You know, that path. And this is such a disillusioning thing that I had to go through myself, Andrew. And I'm so glad that I am sort of liberated now. You know, it doesn't mean, again, I don't risk— it doesn't mean I'm knocking on the VC game or don't want to play the game. But definitely want to play it after my financial freedom is secured first.

Yeah, I always say, just to kind of simplify what I was getting at, bootstrap if you want to create wealth, and then raise venture capital if you want to disrupt the market.

Yeah, well said. So let's talk about acquire.com's recent trends that you're noticing. And I mean, I feel like there's been a lot of activity in the AI space. I'm seeing a lot of screenshots, a lot of people building AI products, growing them, and then, you know, of course exiting. If you had to share 2 or 3 tactical tips about what people should be building in AI space or any other trend that you want to encourage founders to think about, what would that be?

I would say so. The AI space, I— it's too early for me to give an opinion on, if I'm being honest. Like, we're seeing a flood of them come in.

Yeah.

And, you know, there's one debate that, you know, they're built on ChatGPT, so that might change. You have platform risk, but they're growing. Like, we've— I've seen some ones like, this is a rocket ship, like zero to $10 million in like 8 months. Someone listed a business like that on there. They took it down and they ended up raising a round of financing. But like, we— some are just rocket ships. So if you want to get into AI, what I would do is I'd probably go back to my first strategy. Create an AI podcast. Yeah. Interview all the experts in AI. Write about AI. And then from there, you'll start to You know, because you're learning from the best. And then so there's kind of a cop-out answer on AI in terms of, you know, what really performs well on acquire.com and really is just kind of our bread and butter sweet spot, if you will, is profitable SaaS businesses, profitable e-commerce. I think if you just build a great business that's profitable, you're going to have a lot of buyers reaching out to you. People are really, really, really interested. and profitable startups more than ever right now. So regardless if you're building a SaaS business or an e-commerce business or an agency or a marketplace or a mobile app, whatever it may be, if it's profitable and it's growing to some degree, it may not be the next Slack or, you know, whatever public company you want to name, you're going to get buyers interested. Definitely interested in it. And then the inverse is true for, surprisingly, venture-backed businesses do pretty poorly on Acquire because when you're losing money, you're essentially a liability. So no one wants to buy a business that's burning, you know, $50,000 to $100,000 a month or whatever the number may be. And those are just really— because what they're going to have to do when they buy the company is structure it to sustainability, bring it to profitability, probably reduce staff. Yeah. So if you're in that situation, you're listening to this, I'd recommend, you know, positioning your company more favorably by bringing it to profitability. If you— because we are seeing a few of those where, you know, they just can't raise the next round of funding or whatever it may be. So if you're in that situation, structure your company to profitability, and then when you go to market to sell, you'll get a lot more buyer interest, basically. Do the work upfront is kind of what I'm getting at.

I feel like you'll get a kick out of this. I wrote about acquire.com in my journal a few months ago. And I said something on the lines of, it is my intention and dream to build an idea, take it all the way, the 9 yards, launch it, grow it, and like a SaaS idea, and then sell it on MicroAcquire. I wonder how many listeners and how many founders who follow you and in our circles have some version of this. But you'll be happy to hear that I'm actually— I've made a lot of progress in that journey. And I'm really happy about that. You know, this is a micro coaching moment, if you're ready. I got a couple of questions for you about specifically the thing that I'm building on and would love your advice on.

Yeah.

Cool?

Yeah, man. I love the goal. Let's see if I can help you get there.

So, well, I don't know if you saw, but so a couple of weeks ago, I started a SaaS idea, which was actually, it was brewing inside the fellowship that I'm building called Building Public Fellowship, which is kind of like a community, like the On Deck no-code community I built. And it's Building Public Fellowship. And inside of that, every week we have this friendly competition where we talk about, my whole philosophy is that Twitter or content creation anywhere, it's not about output. It's not about how sort of views and engagement and likes, it's about how many— shots on goal you got to do. So we created a Google Sheet that tracks KP and Andrew and a few of all of us and then tracks like daily output. How many tweets have you made? And they're original tweets, not replies and smileys and, you know, that kind of stuff. And it's become such a fun thing that everyone's like, it's like a video game scoreboard and everyone is like, okay, I'm gonna be this week's champion, next week's champion. And we found such great daily active activity on that, we thought one of the builders, one of the developers in the fellowship just built an MVP with me and we just launched it. It's called leaderbird.co. And again, following sort of some of the advice you shared in the previous podcast, I had just a card landing page with a Stripe checkout and said, is this useful? And I got, I think, 3 or 4 right away paid. So I was like, okay, this seems some—

It's useful.

There we go.

I was like,

okay, this is, this is

Confirmed. Thank you.

And it's better than all the zeros I got, let me tell you, of all the previous projects. So I was like, okay, this is there. And then I built an MVP. The guy built an MVP in 10 days. We've been having so much fun. Now we have 20 paying customers. It blows my mind. And literally, this is what I wrote in my journal, right? I was like, I want to be a SaaS founder with 10 paying customers. And so I've been feeling like this is awesome. My question to you, sort of like the micro coaching moment, is What would you do in my shoes, Andrew? I guess maybe a better framing to make it a great asset for any buyer on MicroAcquire. Sorry if it sounds greedy. Did the question sound greedy? I don't mean to like say like, I'm going to make a lot of money thing. I'm like, just want to make sure that it's an asset.

Well, I mean, that's the goal when you sell your business is you want to maximize your exit. And so, to do that, You know, number one, I would say, you know, be prepared in advance. Preparation before you go to market is key. And what I mean by that is, you know, putting together certain documents. We have tons of templates on acquire.com, like a CIM. It's a fancy acronym for Confidential Information Memorandum, which is basically a front-to-back overview of your business. Mm-hmm. The things that buyers are going to be looking at are, you know, what is your churn? What is your growth rate? Growth rate is huge. And, you know, is this business profitable? What are the additional growth opportunities? It depends on where you are in terms of the number. If you're at millions in revenue, you know, profitability and growth are going to be more top of mind. But if you're on the smaller end, let's say you're in the sub-$100,000 in revenue, the buyers of those businesses are buying them with the goal of growing it. They want to take it from $100,000 to $500,000. And so like every buyer wants to grow a business that they grow, but on the smaller end, when you see a $50,000 acquisition versus, you know, $5 million acquisition, the person buying the $50K one wants to turn it into $250,000 leveraging, you know, their marketing skills or sales skills. So having, you know, those growth opportunities like laid out, like things that you would do if you had an extra million dollars to grow the business. I always love that question. Like, if you had a million dollars right now to grow the business, how would you grow it? Other things is, you know, having just really great unit economics. Like, are you able to acquire a customer profitably? Like, that's Massive. Like, if you're spending a dollar on ads, but you're getting 30 cents back, you have a business model that's unsustainable. And that's not— that's a huge red flag to buyers. But I don't know. Okay, you're at 20 customers. So what do you do? How do you get 1,000 customers? You know, my answer is going to be kind of a cop-out one, but just keep doing what you're doing. Like, keep focusing on what's working. I think a mistake that a lot of founders make is they get those 20 customers and congrats, enjoy the moment. Like, it's like when you get that feeling of product market fit, it's like, it's hard to describe. It's almost like a drug. It's like this adrenaline rush. So take a moment to enjoy it. I gotta say that first because a lot of founders, I think, don't enjoy it because it goes away, you know.

And then you're chasing the 100, the 1,000 and whatever. Yeah.

Yeah, then you're just going into repetition. You know, it's, it's, it's launch consistency. And then just, yeah, keep, you know, cop-out answer, but it's true. Like, just keep doing what you're doing because it's working and it compounds. And, you know, we can apply that to kind of anything I've done in my career where you just keep doing the things that you know work. And I'm sure the way you got your 20 clients You enjoy doing it. Yeah. It's through community. It's through networking, speaking with people, helping people. Keep doing more of that and then find ways to accelerate it, do more of it. So that's—

I love it.

There's no secret. There's just no secret answer. There's no— I don't have like a buy a Super Bowl ad and, you know, put it on New

York Times

banner. Quadruple.

Yeah. I mean, I think the other thing too, what I've been fascinated In my sort of experience with this, you know, the app is the anticipation was, um, until I got to this stage, I was like, I think I had a lot of, I guess, you know, opinions and thoughts and all that. And now that I'm here, the way I got to the 0 to the 20, it's been so much fun. So it's like, I'm not even in a rush to go to 1,000 or 2,000 or whatever, you know. So I think there's— I think a lot of founders should, to your point, To get to these places and get to these stages to realize like how fun it is because you have something that's working. Just enjoy the moment and like keep pulling that lever that's working, like you said, right? And, you know, it's very hard to get that. I've had so many failed products that never saw this moment. So I have a lot of appreciation for that.

Yeah. I mean, it's, in my opinion, my favorite time in startups is when you don't know when any, how it's going to work. You don't have any, Like, you know, MicroAcquire as an example, and I'm using MicroAcquire just for this podcast. We'll keep it OG.

Consistent.

Original name. You know, we didn't have— I didn't have any paying customers for a year. Like, I went a year without any sort of business model or plan or anything like that. We were seeing businesses, or I was seeing businesses be acquired. I was seeing lots of buyers sign up. And then I finally put up, there was a specific founder and I still know who he is and I joke about it with him from time to time, but he would complain a lot in terms of, you know, and I love harsh feedback. I love telling me like what sucks about the platform. Because if you tell me everything's good, I can't fix it. Like, thanks. But when you tell me something sucks, I know what to fix. But he was getting so many buyer requests, he didn't know who to focus on. So we'd take out all the names and then I'd look them up and I'd kind of rank them for him or something like that, if my memory is correct. And I was like, all right, we need to put up like a paywall because a lot of these people have no interest in buying your company. And then that's how we got our, the business model we have now. We're going to be charging commissions soon, but right now to access deals, it's either $400 or $800 a year depending on the size of the deal. But that all started just from listening to a customer and hearing their complaint. And then I threw up really junky looking payment page and I'd have to manually activate their account, you know? So yeah, enjoy those moments, man, because, you know, it's fun and it's scrappy and you're just putting it together. But, you know, just also keep doing what's working.

Thank you.

And make those initial customers your initial 20 customers the happiest they could possibly be.

That's another thing I've noticed is sort of, that's why I was touching on the customer service aspect, customer support aspect of you earlier, is just making sure that you're giving them, you know, enough time and nourishment. And like, just, I think they can sense care. People can sense care, you know, so they know if your heart's in it or not. One last question as we switch topics, and I know you have a hard stop. What is, uh, what is, um, Andrew the dad like? I see a lot of, uh, photos of you and your son and love it. I have a boy too, uh, 2 years old. And what is, what is it like to hang out with you as a dad? I'm curious.

Uh, I think you should ask the duty. Yeah, I was gonna say, uh, so I, I typically will, will drive him to, like, I drove him to daycare today. Um, you know, I, I'll pick 'em up today and I'm always the, the closer. So every night I, I redo it.

Oh my God.

That's like my dedicated job.

Me too. Oh my God. That's so funny. I read.

Yeah. How, how many books do you read?

I, he's in the, uh, still in the lullaby season, so I'm like still singing like all kinds of songs and we read like, we just bought a Grover, Sesame Street Grover book. So he's not patient. He's 2 years old. He's like, done, done. Just sing. He wants me to sing. But how, what, what about you?

I do, uh, 5 books and then I'll read, I'll read more books if he negotiates. So if he's like, no, one more, and I'll ask why. And he, he's also in the why phase and the why phase. So he's 3 and a half. So he'll ask like, why? And then some, I'll take it as far as we can go because I love just the curiosity and I want to inspire that into him. Like, always ask why, like, you know, be curious. Right. But sometimes I— he'll— we'll go like, he'll be like, why is it raining? I'm like, well, there's clouds. Why? Well, condensation goes up in the sky and it creates a cloud. Why? Well, it keeps the trees great. And we'll get to a point where I say, I don't know. And he goes, guess, Daddy. And I'm like, I don't know. Like, you got me. But I bet he enjoys hanging out a lot on the week.

I bet he enjoys.

Yeah, he, he's like a little, little mini me. I see a lot of, uh, well, obviously because I'm his dad, but, um, he's a very curious, funny, um, just sweet kid.

Oh my God, it's so funny because little

guy,

I don't know if every dad with a boy feels the same way because I feel when I see Him. I see a mini me in him. He's goofy. I'm very goofy. Like, when we were at the beach the other day, we were like rolling in the sand and every parent next to us were cracking up because we were both like 2 seals from the sea that came over. They were just like rolling and having fun. And he's got a lot of hype energy, which my wife, much to my wife's dismay, she's like, can you both please calm down? It's 7:30 in the night. We need to go to bed. But we're like hyping up, hyping each other up, you know? So it's just— Wild, man. What I love about your face though is that I've seen that baseball games you take into the photos and I'm like, I cannot wait for those because we haven't been to games yet. Um, I can't wait for a Warriors game or to a baseball game or something like that.

When a 3, I mean, has been my favorite age so far. Um, I'm obviously a beginner dad. I have only one kid and He just turned 3 and a half. Uh, his birthday is October 29th, so 10 days ago. Uh, and it's just cool. I mean, he's like your little buddy and, you know, you get to be, you know, the father you always wish you had or, you know, the father you did have. But yeah, I don't know. Our thing right now is gardening. I'll just kind of leave it at that. He loves the garden.

Really? Wow. He

loves picking up weeds. Yeah, he, um, Yeah, so I think he's, um, he's going places. I, and I kind of like will joke with him. I'll be like, all right, so we're creating a gardening business. So we, so we got to do a good job and we need to pick up all the weeds. And he's like, all the weeds? And I'm like, yeah, that's a job complete. We gotta, you know, so we'll like joke around like that. But,

um, anyway, I just wanted to toss into that segment because, you know, it just warms my heart when you post photos. And I'm like, it's cool. It's cool to, you know, cause we have all kinds of hats we wear, you know, I think it's, it's, uh, it's fun to see some other founder also having fun. Yeah.

And one thing I'll just add to that too is, um, you know, you know, regardless of like what you do in life, I'm a firm believer of this is, you know, there's people in your life today that, you know, without them you would be nowhere. Like my wife, my son. my, you know, my family. And I think, you know, when you, when we hear about people building businesses, you know, sometimes there's sort of that thought of like, I can't do all this or it's like too much or whatever it may be. But like, don't give up your happiness to like build a business or reach some random business goal or because that won't make you happy. Mm-hmm. To that goal and then you'll turn to your family and then they may not be there. So make time for them. And then oddly enough, that for me, that separation from work and just hanging out with, like I go to lunch with my wife every day. She hurt her toe, so we won't be going today, but that's another story. But my point being is, you know, also understand there's so much like just awesomeness to life. Yeah. friends, like keep in touch with them. Don't be just only all about business. Yeah. Because you're just, you're reaching a goal and then you have no one to share it with. It's

definitely way less fun. And I think, I think it's, you know, to, to wrap this whole thing about to sort of being in the flow state, you know, we, we touched on this before we started the pod where we, we, we were joking that, you know, Steph Curry likes to lock in and stay in that, you know, flow state. And I, I feel that when you are experiencing happiness on a day-to-day basis, whether it's with your relationships, whether it's with creating something new, or your business or your podcast, you just get into that flow state. And I think if you do this day in, day out, that is a happy life. You don't need any arbitrary milestone to get to, to start experiencing this. So fun is in the journey, joy is in the journey has sort of been my mantra. And I know you're a You're like that too. So I appreciate fellow, uh, advocate of philosophy.

I mean, success truly is defined by you and you can make yourself happy. You can choose to be happy. Like you don't, it's not a, you don't need XYZ goal or you don't need XYZ money or XYZ hat, whatever it may be. You know, just, I, what I always think about that's kind of funny is, you know, just how lucky we are in terms of like, just imagine if you were born 100 years ago, like you're going through, uh, the Spanish flu and then you're gonna go through, uh, the Great Depression. Yeah. And then you're gonna go through World War I and then you're gonna go through World War II. You don't have an iPhone. Steam engines and shit.

Yeah.

So also just perspective of just like how good you have it and you may not really realize it, but just think of that one thought. Imagine if you were born 100 years ago. There's actually a good book on this. Um, and it kind of, it's about, I can't remember the name, but it's, it's arguing, would you trade lives today with John Rockefeller, the richest man to ever live, but he lives 100 years ago. He doesn't have an iPhone. So, uh, I don't know where I'm going with this point, but You know, appreciate the things you have in your life and have perspective and just realize that there are so many good things happening in your life, whether, you know, you see them or not.

Yeah. Well said. On that high note, let's call this a wrap. Thank you so much, Andrew. Once again, such a, such a joy, such a pleasure getting to chat with you and, you know, unlock some of that profound wisdom that's locked up in your attic right there. Thank you so much and let's keep in touch.

Yeah, my pleasure, KP, and I'm rooting for you. Thank you. I'm rooting for you to get to 100,000 customers. Oh my God.

Yeah, I think, thank you. And then again, as you know, it's whatever the customers say and wherever it goes, I'm just happy. All right, have a good one, Andrew. Okay, thanks.

You too. Thanks for having me on.